


A Crooked Strain of Hope

by YourPalYourBuddy



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: (brief but still, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Bucky centric, Diary/Journal, M/M, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the Stucky relationship is more at the end of things, warning for discussion of past torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-01
Updated: 2017-06-01
Packaged: 2018-11-07 14:20:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11060793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YourPalYourBuddy/pseuds/YourPalYourBuddy
Summary: He’s dimly aware of alarms sounding as he stores the journal underneath his coat, straining to capture that fragment of a memory. But whatever remnant of Bucky Barnes remembered punching glass with his flesh left arm disappears as silently as he’d come.____________Bucky recovers with the aid of a journal. Written for the 2017 Cap RBB :)





	A Crooked Strain of Hope

**Author's Note:**

  * For [laisserais](https://archiveofourown.org/users/laisserais/gifts).



> This is my fanfic for the amazing laisserais' artwork :) You can find her on Tumblr [right here!](http://laisserais.tumblr.com)
> 
> All my love to [Mercedes](http://skatzaa.tumblr.com) and [Marlee](http://oh-emdee.tumblr.com) for beta-ing! <3

________________________

 

This is a mistake.

He’s breathing too heavily right now; someone will hear him, even if the security cameras haven’t been rebooted. He’s not usually this loud, ever, and his mouthguard is somewhere underground back in—somewhere.

Calm, he tells himself. Deep breaths. That’s the one thing they’d tell him that reminded him he wasn’t a machine. He clings to it, lets the fact of his humanity surround him. The fact that he has lungs and can regulate their activity makes him feel more in control. He takes deep breaths, and his heart rate settles.

Okay. Focus, now. There’s no need to panic—he knows what he can do. Some things are foggy, but his capabilities? Those he’s very familiar with.

Something squeaks around the museum’s corner, and he curves instinctively deeper into the shadows.

This is a mistake, he thinks again, and swears.

But then the journal’s in front of him behind a thin sheet of glass, and what’s glass to his metal arm? There was a time when he’d cringe just thinking about what he was about to do. Now he makes a fist, takes a breath, and punches clean through.

He’s dimly aware of alarms sounding as he stores the journal underneath his coat, straining to capture that fragment of a memory. But whatever remnant of Bucky Barnes remembered punching glass with his flesh left arm disappears as silently as he’d come.

____________

 

It’s heavy and uncertain in his hands, this journal. He’s in a bolthole thirty minutes from the Smithsonian and the journal’s out of place on the kitchen table. Just looking at it makes him think of blood and gunfire and he’s not sure if it’s memories about this journal or another, redder one.

He tears himself away and goes about tearing out the surveillance tech in the tiny house. No need to shout his whereabouts for all of HYDRA to hear, or SHIELD for that matter.

It would be a lie if he said he knew for sure which one he was running from, or toward, or his relationship with them in general. He pushes the thought down.

He finds twenty small cameras and twenty-five listening devices and crushes them in his metal hand.

That settled, he returns to the journal. It’s made of a blue fabric that has faded to white-yellow along the edges and the feel of it is familiar and the fact of that makes him frown.

This feels dangerous. Already there are memories threatening to surface; they’re pressing on an invisible wall in his mind, and he can feel it cracking. He won’t be able to go back from this if he reads it.

Abruptly he scrapes his chair back and screams and his nails dig into the table. Then he sits down again. Pulls the journal to him.

He wasn’t given the option to go forward with this in the past—seventy years, he thinks a lab tech said once.

He stands the journal up on its spine and lets it fall open.

_When you loved me, I—_

He throws it across the room.

____________

 

Why did he grab it in the first place? He asks himself this while pulling on a grey baseball cap. There’s nothing in the fridge and it’s not like he can sleep through his hunger anymore.

Why did he take it?

It was shouting at him. Is shouting at him. He hasn’t touched it since that first night; it is still too blue against the golden brown grains of the kitchen table and it forces him to look at it even as he straps on his shoes.

There’s a faded brown splotch of blood on his shoes, and he looks at that instead.

He should move the journal from the table. Maybe to somewhere in the bedroom, but even that seems like dangerous ground. He’s never been given the opportunity to distance himself from these things before.

He zips up a jacket, kicks at the table leg. He wants milk, eggs, beef, and strawberries. The nearest grocery store is ten minutes away on D.C.’s public transportation, which ordinarily wouldn’t be something he’d have to consider, but there’s no reason for his face to be public knowledge. Not yet, anyway.

He’ll figure out the journal later. Read it from the beginning, no more ‘let it fall where it will’, not after that last time.

He glances at it once more, then closes the door.

____________

 

_I appreciate this as my birthday gift but Buck I don’t even know how to write in a journal. I just don’t really think my thoughts are important as that. And do I say everything, or only the big things, the ones that really matter? But then, doesn’t it all matter? And then I don’t know how to say it. Words are as difficult as the right color blue-green-grey for your eyes. But you’re right, this is exactly the color of the sky that day._

____________

 

The museum said James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes, but here the Captain says Buck. And the Captain said Bucky when they fought, too; he thinks he remembers a smaller version of the Captain saying Bucky, before—whatever happened. Before it all.

He did a quick count and there are thirty-eight handwritten entries. Near the end they start to look like official medical documents.

He wonders briefly how many entries there are in the red journal, and then if he can control the Captain, somehow, with this one.

Someone inside him squirms against that idea, but he muffles it. It had to be thought.

This first entry was very short and dated September 19th. September 19th, if he remembers right from the museum, is not Captain America’s birthday; it’s July 4th, he thinks. At least that’s what he’s overheard in the past, anyway.

September 19th feels right though. It presses against a rib on his left side and it hurts there but it feels right. It’s filling an absence, anyhow.

He checks the time. As the Asset, he’s never been in charge of his sleeping; the past few days he’s been unable to sleep well at all, even with the fan on and the TV and the radio. The cryo chambers are noisier than they’d seem. He hasn’t been able to reproduce that, just yet.

But he thinks maybe 0300 hours is very late, or very early. The numbers don’t mean much to him but he thinks the doctors would be tired around now.

He’s been forcing himself to prep for sleep the way they do in the late-night shows, the ones where the characters are all in love with each other and bicker and fall apart and then fall together in unending cycles. They always seem to brush their teeth and put on soft shirts and soft pants. He does the same.

It does nothing for him because he’s aware that he’s trying to fool himself into normalcy. You can’t fool someone who’s aware of the trick.

Regardless, he brushes his teeth and puts on soft clothes and hides the Captain’s journal underneath the bed, which is useless because it’s right _there,_ but there’s something comforting about pretending it’s far away. It feels human to tuck things out of sight.

He falls asleep for exactly seventeen minutes and forty-three seconds.

____________

 

_Okay, well, I’m still not sure what to put here, but you bought us strawberries somehow so that’s worth mentioning I think. Thanks, Bucky._

_I think it’s easier writing this like I’m writing to you so that’s what I’ll do. There’s no reason you’ll ever read this, so it’s okay. You know all of this anyway._

____________

 

When he reads the word “strawberries” he steps away, closes the journal, and curls up on his bed. Something about seeing it written in the Captain’s handwriting, something about the way those S’s curl twists its way into his chest.

He spends the rest of the day watching what purport to be reruns, but he’s never seen them before so he doesn’t mind.

The cut strawberries in the fridge call to him in words with curling S’s. He turns up the volume, drowning them out.

____________

 

_Mom died today._

____________

 

He…he remembers that. It was hot and his collar stuck to his throat with sweat and Steve trooped up to the front of the church and read something, and when they held hands at the cemetery, Steve’s nails dug into the back of his hand.

He looks now, and there are pale crescents just underneath his little finger, and he wonders how many of his scars are ones from back then.

And then he drops the journal and sits up in his chair. Leans against of the chair so much so that the slats press sharp against his shoulder blades.

He called him “Steve” in his head.

He says, “Steve,” and his voice rasps into the kitchen. The name’s heavy on his tongue, but it tastes sticky sweet like the juice dripping down his chin that one summer when they snuck out to—somewhere.

He can feel that invisible wall splintering down around him and behind it is a skinny boy whose face shines like the streetlights coming through a window that he dimly remembers.

He spends the rest of the night saying “Steve” aloud.

____________

 

There’s a black car with tinted windows parked across the street.

It looks out of place on this street, especially framed by flowery curtains, but it sends his heart beating harder. It has been there for six hours without anyone interacting with it at all. It looks like the car he blew up weeks ago, or he thinks it does; he remembers shooting someone through a wall, but everything else is hazy.

He doesn’t think he wants to remember what else happened.

It’s not important now, anyhow. There’s a black car with tinted windows outside his safe house.

The fact of it crawls up his arms and it takes him a moment to realize it’s because he doesn’t want to leave. He’s not supposed to form this sort of attachment to places—they always said, in hushed whispers when they thought he couldn’t hear, that attachments would make him unstable.

Part of him hates the house for that reason. The other part clings to it harder with desperate fingers.

But there’s a car outside. He knows how this plays out. He’s performed this script enough for it to be familiar.

It takes him thirteen minutes to erase himself from the house. He takes the back door, and leaves it unlocked.

____________

 

_You snore. Did you know that?_

_It’s comforting now, but that first night it was like falling asleep next to a thunderstorm made solid. Though I suppose that’s true of being next to you anyway. You’ve never been easy get a hand on. It makes painting you difficult, you’ve got so much energy tied up in your muscles. Even sitting you seen like you’d run across the room in an instant._

_And your hair sticks up in the back. I think you know that because I’ve mentioned it enough times; it’s the only thing that makes you look disreputable, the only thing other than that smirk you do when you’re right in an argument._

_But you snore and I’m gonna miss that. You got back from your night of debauchery after the Expo smelling like wine and beer and it makes you snore worse than usual._

_I’ll miss all of you. I already do. You hid your draft letter from me, made it seem like you’d volunteered. You put it under the bed, Buck. I found it ages ago._

_You hid it from me and for me somehow because they’ll never take me, or it seemed like it before this evening. But I think you wanted to pretend to be brave for yourself too, like if it was out of sight you could believe it was your choice and not something someone forced on you._

_You’ve always been brave. You’re holding me, in your sleep, like you never will again, and it’s a bravery for you to do that. Even if it’s just in your sleep._

_We’ll both come out of this okay. Erskine’s pretty confident in his serum, and I’m confident in you and your sharp eyes. We’ll be fine and we’ll have strawberries with dinner, and you’ll smirk and I’ll roll my eyes, and we’ll come out of this whistling._

_Of course it won’t be that easy. But times like this it feels like it will._

____________

 

He reads this one in a motel in New Jersey. It’s either the motel, with its old, beech bark-like peeling wallpaper that’s making him uneasy, or the state itself; that’s ridiculous though. He’s never been to New Jersey, there’s no need for it to make him uncomfortable.

Still. New Jersey.

He scowls at a generic painting on the opposite wall.

He pushes Jersey out of his mind and goes back to the journal, tapping his fingers on “serum” in Steve’s second-to-last paragraph. Something dark sings in his veins at the sight of the word. This is what Zola was trying to do to him.

Letting his mind linger on it is more dangerous than anything. This much he is sure of.

He lets his head drop into his hands, searching for a distraction.

There’s been no sign thus far of the black car. It’s been—forty-two hours since he saw it last. In that time he switched out his clothing and tried to cut his hair; it’s still long, but he has the barest hint of what he thinks the TV characters would call ‘bangs’.

Those were an accident. But it has him thinking now, as he runs his hands through his hair, about some style to pull it away from his face.

There never was a need back then for any kind of personal grooming. Feeling his hair though, how it catches against his fingers, he wishes he had someone else with him.

His memories whisper about a girl with his smirk and sharp eyes and braided hair, but he can’t remember her name and she slips away.

____________

 

_You’ve been gone for awhile now and I don’t know if you’d recognize me if you saw me. That serum was something._

_I’m getting a handle on it now, Buck, but let me tell you that was an awkward few days afterward. I kept bumping into things. Looked like that blind cat Mrs. Callahan had next door, remember it?_

_I’m not on the front so you’d be pleased about that. But I’m restless cooped up here. There’s so much I can do now, and they have me in tights onstage._

_At the end of the month they’re sending me overseas. Hopefully I’ll run into the 107th. I miss your snoring._

____________

 

That night when he tries for sleep he has the TV on and the radio playing static, and the rooms around him are noisy too, and he has the air conditioning on high. He untucks the plasticky blankets and rolls them around him like a cocoon—or he thinks that’s what they’re called—and tonight he thinks, maybe, he could fall asleep like this. This feels like what he’s used to.

The TV says something about the Avengers in Sokovia, and he nods off to footage of a city falling from the sky.

Somehow the crashing makes him drift off easier. He sleeps for a record two hours and fifty-seven minutes.

____________

 

It’s quiet today, so after checking out the window for the car he cracks two eggs and fries them and puts them on bread. The yolk oozes out of the sandwich and down his hand like blood.

He shakes his head.

His glance flicks over to the journal where it’s sitting on the couch. It looks more at home here, surrounded by beaten down furniture and cracked lighting. The lamplight fractures across the worn cover.

He pauses, the sandwich grazing his lips, before frantically wiping off his hands. He nearly falls in his rush to the couch.

Shaking, he picks up the journal.

There are words on the front, or the indentation of them. He runs his fingers over them carefully.

He opens the cover.

 _Stevie,_ someone’s written, _I know we said no gifts, but I saw this and it’s that color you said you needed, to paint the sky from the day we had our picnic, remember? It’s that color exactly. And I know this is a writer’s journal, but maybe you could draw in it too. It’s got lines but I think you can do it even so. I think I’m supposed to say something else here, something sappy? But you know already. Love, your Bucky._

There are pens in the bedside table and a little notepad. He takes them out of the drawer, eyes stuck on “Love, your Bucky”.

The pen’s clumsy in his hand but he manages to copy down the first line just fine.

It’s rough and trembling; his letters come out spidery and frightened-looking. He holds the paper up to the journal.

He blinks. Takes a shuddering breath and traps it.

Slowly, gripping his pen as if it was the last thing keeping him from falling from a great height, he writes, “Love, your Bucky”. The writer of the inscription flicked the tail of the Y’s the exact same way he just did. Has the same loop on the L.

He sits there openmouthed and automatically he tries to regulate his breathing, struggling to feel in control.

But then it hits him full force.

He was in love once. He drops the pen.

He’s crying as he slips off the couch onto the floor and he stays there a long time.

____________

 

_We're too big for this bed. I'm taller and longer and we’ve both got more muscle now than we ever had before, and it's all awkward arms around waists and your face is buried into my pillow. It's hard to write like this with you close to my chest the way you are but at least you're not making that noise anymore, the one that Mrs. Callahan’s pup used to make when it was worried about someone getting too close. I've got this journal, this one you bought me back home, on your shoulder, and I'm just realizing I haven't touched it since I left to come here. The last full page is sketches of that lemon cake we tried for our birthday party._

_You're a lot calmer now. You’re snoring and the worry line between your eyebrows is gone. I'll deal with your “Steve you shouldn't, you've got rank now” and whatever anyone else says in the morning. Because Buck it doesn't matter what they say about me. When it comes to you, it's never mattered._

____________

 

He dreams and everything is grey.

He takes a step forward and it’s like swimming through mostly dried concrete; he sweats, and swears, but he moves.

Now he sees that there are varying shades of grey. There’s a faint line differentiating whatever he’s standing on with a wall of some sort, or—the ceiling? Maybe a ceiling, if it’s much further off.

He takes another step forward and stumbles over something on the ground.

 _“Bucky?”_ a voice says. It sounds like strawberries taste.

The scenery changes. Now he’s on the street, the sun shining bright overhead. There is something pricking his neck and when he rubs it, his glove comes away stabbed by glass shards. Blood shines faintly on the very splintery edge.

He turns and he turns slowly because his feet are almost stuck to the ground. Steve, hair lit by the sun, eyes sad and disbelieving and hopeful all at once; Steve stares at him and the street crumbles into an alpine crevasse.

 _“Who the hell is Bucky?”_ he says now. Steve looks like he knows who he is so he moves toward him.

And then Steve screams his name because now Bucky’s falling. Or, whoever Bucky used to be is falling, because the next time he wakes up there’s a terrifyingly familiar face looming overhead and a new voice talking to him, and it says:

_“James Buchanan Barnes. You will be the new fist of HYDRA.”_

Someone laughs, and he flinches and squeezes his eyes shut.

____________

 

Bucky wakes up screaming and everything is grey again and he desperately feels around for his knife before realizing that this is real life. The handle of his knife sticks out from underneath the motel pillow.

To be sure he pinches himself; that’s what they do on TV when someone’s unsure of reality.

The pinch hurts.

He sighs and it rattles hollowly against the bones in his chest.

____________

 

_Around one you woke up with sleepy eyes and mussed hair and there’s a line on your cheek from a fold in my shirt. You crawled closer to me and closed your eyes again and now you’re snoring on me._

_It’s been four days, Buck. Fours days since you came back from the dead and three nights with Gabe telling me you’ve been repeating your rank and serial in your sleep. This is the third night we’ve spent together and the third time you’ve told me I shouldn’t do this anymore._

_And I understand your point. I do. But Buck I just think maybe you’re not telling me something. You’ve always been intense about certain things but you’re withdrawn now, most of the time, and I’m not sure why. Morita dropped his soup yesterday and cussed up a storm and there was a time when you’d be messing with him—remember when I drank watercolor paint water by accident?—, but you kept your head down like the laughing bothered you._

_I thought you woke up; you said something about serum and then you said my name, but I checked and you were just talking in your sleep. You didn’t use to do that. You’re not snoring anymore, either, and you’ve curled in on yourself like the bed’s cold._

____________

 

Bucky’s in a hotel now. Ninth floor, so he can see.

He wonders, playing absently with a hole in the comforter, what would’ve happened if he’d told Steve about Zola’s experiment; but there’s nothing good to be found pursuing that thought process, so he lets it drop.

He’s getting close to the entry the journal fell open on. He’s had to fight the pages a little this whole time; the spine of the book is broken at that point, so it naturally wants to open there.

It feels almost a little threatening. “When you loved me, I—”

He’s not sure he wants to know what it means in context.

He’s been in bed the last twenty-six hours, except for when he needs the bathroom or a snack, just as a result of finding out he was in love. He’s not sure what would happen should be realize it wasn’t returned.

Or, worse, what would happen if Steve had felt the same.

Something inside him shatters a little just thinking about it.

____________

 

_It’s the Fourth of July today, and the boys all came up to me and slapped me on the back and asked Phillips for leave to get drunk in the pub._

_“Absolutely not,” he says around a cigar, gruff. I’d use a rougher brush for him, if he ever let me paint him some day._

_Dugan grinned then and said, “But it’s Captain America’s birthday. Sir.”_

_You looked confused then, and I think Peggy realized you were about to speak because she lit a cigarette and said, “It’d certainly be a break for the men. It wouldn’t hurt.”_

_I told you afterward how I’m all propaganda now. How every single thing about me is carefully engineered to be best for the Captain’s image, even my birthday. You just hugged me and then shook your head._

_It’s two thirty now. I don’t know Buck, I can’t fall asleep. It’s not sleeping with you—God knows we’ve done this enough times for it to be natural—but I’m thinking now about that night at the bar, after we blew up that base and you walked out with me, when your glass was empty but your eyes weren’t drooping the way they do after you’ve had that much to drink._ _I can’t get drunk, either. And you were drinking tonight but you still looked wide awake._

_I told Peggy and her eyebrows knit together sharp and fast. I told her, “We need Stark,” and she told me she was thinking the same thing._

_And I’d hoped I was imagining it. You’re in my arms again and Gabe’s in my tent tonight, because he walked in earlier and knows and didn’t do anything other than look surprised, then thoughtful, and then a sort of_ of course _that still makes me a little nervous to think about. You’re not sleeping right now; it’s too early, still, for something in your body to let go of you just yet, and I’m just realizing that I’d noticed and hoped not to._

_Your eyes are shut now. I think you’re sleeping._

_Gabe’s the one who first said it, and then Morita after he had, and Falsworth and Dernier and Peggy too, after she overheard what we were saying. I don’t know where you were; probably out practicing somewhere, or assigned somewhere; we don’t usually talk about what you do, do we? Maybe we should._

_“Do we know what they did to him?” is what Gabe said. “They’re trying to make another you—” He nodded at me here. “—aren’t they? Do you think—”_

_And let me tell you, that walloped against my ribs right along with my heartbeat. Bucky, the thought of them doing anything to you makes me feel unsettled in my stomach._

_Peggy set down her cigarette to look at me steadily. She said, “They’re definitely trying to. We don’t yet know how successful they’ve been.”_

_I’m thinking it explains a lot. I don’t want to be but I’m remembering your empty glass, and your not-drunkenness, and it would explain a lot. Just thinking that makes something feel heavy and solid in my stomach._

_This is a long one, huh. I left after she said that so I don’t know what else was said. We’re going to get Howard and put our heads together._

_But for now I’m going to put this down and hold you, if you’ll let me, and then I’m going to sleep with you the way we used to when we were home and legacies weren’t something we talked about over runny eggs and sausages that aren’t meat._

____________

 

Bucky frowns.

This passage isn’t much of anything new; the SSR must have known Zola and the Red Skull were working on another super soldier formula. A niggling suspicion in the back of his mind tells him that he’d known this then as well, when they were experimenting on him.

He hadn’t known that Steve knew though. Or, Bucky might have known then; the idea of it makes his heart trip in his chest.

But he’s not thinking about that, not really. That’s not something he can stand to think about.

Bucky’s thinking about that comment about Gabe—Jones? That feels right—walking in on them. He’s thinking about “of course”.

A crooked strain of hope crawls around his heart and pulls tight.

____________

 

Today Bucky tucks the journal underneath the bed and opens his phone. His hair brushes against his collarbone now; it’s too long not to do something with it. He thinks there are a few shows with characters who have hair his length, they’ve got to have styling ideas.

Somehow he stumbles across a hairstyle channel on YouTube and follows her cheerful instructions, letting her talk him through six different hairstyles before landing on one he likes best.

His hair is twisted into a wispy braid that goes around his entire head. He feels like—he feels yellow. A soft and cool yellow.

He likes it. There’s a video playing behind his eyes of a girl he thinks is his sister, and she’s laughing the way sunlight rests on water. She holds out a daisy, but he blinks and she’s gone.

He runs his fingers over the braid and thinks about a tiny Brooklyn apartment while Rachel and Ross argue onscreen.

____________

 

The journal stares at him from the corner of his eye as he cleans off strawberries in the bathroom sink. He ignores it, or tries to; his heart is already going so fast.

He takes the strawberries to the bed and eats one, all the while tapping his left hand against the bowl. His metal fingers clink against the ceramic.

It’s time for it. The walls in his mind are already crumbling. There’s not much else this entry can do to him.

There shouldn’t be.

He tells himself he’s ready, and the journal falls open.

____________

 

_Peggy and Howard came up with the idea, I just helped them carry it out. Or, they came up with the science part of it; I reminded them of what we did after Erskine was killed, about drawing blood and analyzing it. “Locked in your DNA,” I think the nurse said._

_Well. We’re doing our best to separate whatever they did to you from yours. We’re not sure it’ll work. Howard’s always cocky but I can tell he’s nervous about this._

_It wasn’t very simple to get you to agree to it, though admittedly you didn’t know what it was; all I said was, “Buck, they need us to donate blood,” and you immediately frowned and your face closed off, and that was something else that would’ve tipped me off back home. You did it, though._

_This is the second week we’ve been here together. When I take naps now and then, it’s odd sleeping without you on my chest._

_I’m thinking just now actually that you don’t have to do that anymore, do you? At home when you loved me, I had asthma still; I remember that night before all of this, when I couldn’t breathe and you thought it was an attack. It wasn’t. I couldn’t figure a way to tell you it’s just how I felt at kissing all of you._

_But you slept with your head on my chest back then like you are now and I think it’s because of the asthma. You liked knowing that I was still breathing in the middle of the night._

_You don’t have to now. I think it’s more comforting for you than me at this point._

____________

 

The second after Bucky reads the last line he’s on his feet packing. He’s out the front door of the hotel in five minutes.

The morning kisses his lips. He closes his eyes for a moment, letting the feeling linger, before stepping into the sunlight.

A subtle strain of strawberries is in the air and it brushes across his cheek.

____________

 

He doesn’t quite know where to go, all told. That’s not true. He has been walking for—nine hours now, give or take, and he’s close now.

The fact that he doesn’t know the exact time makes him smile a little.

He keeps imagining—remembering?—the feeling of blood being sucked out of his arm. It feels like possibility, and he smiles so wide.

____________

 

The Smithsonian looms almost overwhelmingly before him. _This is a mistake_ screams at a low volume in his head, but he walks up the steps anyway.

The Captain America exhibit is to the right of the main entrance. It’s night, so there’s not as many people here as there were that first day. It’s a blessing for his mind.

It’s a blessing for his mind, but not his heart; Bucky had thought if anywhere—

“Bucky?”

If anywhere, here.

He goes for the knife in his jacket before he realizes it. Bucky exhales, releasing the tension in his hands.

He says, “Steve?”

And then there he is, coming slowly out of a dimly lit corner. Steve’s hair shines a dusty yellow in the dull museum lighting. It does, Bucky notes, exaggerate the shadows under his eyes.

Steve’s apprehension shouts in the way he holds his shoulders. Bucky smiles a little at that.

Steve says, “Do you remember me?”

Some part of Bucky knew that Steve would have that little crease between his eyebrows when he said that. He wants to smooth it out with his thumb.

“Don’t frown, you’ll get wrinkles,” Bucky says, before he can think about it.

“It’s too late for that, Buck,” Steve says. “I’m wrinkly everywhere,” but now his words are short and choked and it sounds like he’s about to cry.

It pulls at something in Bucky’s chest. “Steve?”

Steve looks up.

And then Bucky’s holding him to his chest, and Steve settles his head on Bucky’s right shoulder the way he knew he would, somehow, and they’re both talking at once and it’s hard to breathe but it’s perfect. It’s not enough and it’s too much.

It’s exactly right.

Bucky cries into Steve’s shirt. Steve holds him tighter.

____________

 

“I was waiting for you,” Steve whispers. Bucky feels his words vibrate against the back of his head. He reaches toward Steve, and Steve takes his hand and kisses his knuckles.

It’s not quite their Brooklyn apartment, but then, they’re not quite from Brooklyn anymore either. They’ll always be less and more than they were.

Thinking that way doesn’t bother Bucky tonight. Tonight, he leans into Steve, and the idea of who they were doesn’t leave a scar.

“How’d you know?” he says, quiet.

“Maria Hill told me, said someone had taken my journal. I thought—” Steve pauses, coughs. Bucky relaxes when he starts breathing regularly again. “—I’d hoped, I mean, that you’d have it. That you’d come back. I stayed there that whole time. Did a lot of meet-and-greets in the hopes that you’d come.”

“I have to ask you something,” Bucky says. “About the journal.” He sits up.

And pauses. Steve on a bed from this angle looks familiar. It’s…distracting.

The corner of Steve’s mouth twitches like he’s remembering too. “Go on,” he whispers.

“Your last entry…about drawing blood?” Steve sits up now too. He twines their fingers together. “Did you—?”

“Did we figure it out?” Steve looks at their hands. “Not back then. But they said they had, when they woke me up; took them ages, because they thought you’d—well. After the Winter Soldier rumors though, after they realized the base, they started up again.”

Steve trails off. Bucky waits for him to finish.

Every second feels like an eternity.

Steve looks up again and Bucky sees it on his face, what his answer is. He holds his breath.

“They did,” Steve says softly, and Bucky laughs a cry. He could kiss him then. “They figured it out, if you want to try. SHIELD was looking for you, to test it.”

Bucky frowns, thinking. “That car, outside my motel?”

Steve nods. “I told them not to engage.”

“Thank you,” Bucky says simply.

They sit like this for some time, just looking. Bucky traces Steve’s lips and chin and jaw and it’s better than how it looks on TV.

Steve smiles then. “What’re you thinking?” Bucky asks.

“Your hair,” he says. Bucky leans down to let him feel his braid, and Steve rests his hand on the side of Bucky’s neck as easy as ever.

“What about it?”

He likes watching Steve talk. He’s pretty when he talks.

Steve says, “Becca used to do your hair like this.”

Bucky’s quiet at that. Her name fits in a spot right under his left rib. “Would you—” He trails off.

Steve’s voice is soft and earnest when he says, “Anything, Buck.”

Bucky sucks in the right side of his bottom lip. “Would you tell me about her?”

“Of course.” Steve takes a beat to gather his thoughts. “Well. She was born when you were three. Premature, tiny thing. You started calling her Becca because you couldn’t pronounce your R’s…”

Bucky lets his words drift over him until they’re both yawning and then talking turns into long, slow pauses between words.

“Steve?”

Steve turns on his side. “Bucky?”

“I’m going to buy a journal tomorrow.”

Steve’s heart is steady and dependable. Through a yawn he says, “That’s a good idea, Buck.”

Bucky mumbles this next into Steve’s side. “I know,” he says. “They’re very useful.”

Steve kisses a smile to the top of his head.

____________

 

Bucky sleeps for exactly eight hours and twenty-four minutes, and Steve teases him about snoring in the morning.

________________________

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> I'm on Tumblr; [come say hi :)](http://untiltheendofthelinebuck)


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